Dunk - Talking about trees
Dunk, T. (1994) Talking about trees: Environment and society in forest workers' culture. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 31: 14-34.
This paper draws on data from open-ended interviews and ethnographic research with forest workers in northwestern Ontario to analyse their relationship to the environment and their representations of environmentalists. It argues that forest workers' interpretations of environmental issues and environmentalists are not solely determined by narrow economic concerns. Environmentalism and environmentalists are connotatively linked to class and regional oppositions so that they become metaphoric and metonymic symbols of other class and regional conflicts. Understanding the specific meaning of environmental issues in forest workers' culture requires an analysis of the way in which their meaning is overdetermined by existing narratives about social divisions rooted in class and space in the process by which forest workers constitute their identity.
Thomas Dunk “Talking about trees: Environment and society in forest workers' culture”